It was a peculiar fantasy, and Toshiko wasn’t normally prone to fantasies. She considered herself a rationalist. Physics was all there was, as far as Toshiko was concerned: everything, in the end, came down to the movements of molecules, of atoms, of elementary particles and, ultimately, quantum energy twisted into multi-dimensional loops and strings.
She and Owen often had this argument, late at night, when there was nobody else around in the Hub. Owen tried to persuade Toshiko that her belief in quantum physics, loop theory and superstrings was itself a faith, given that she couldn’t actually buy them off eBay (and, as far as Owen was concerned, everything he needed in life could be bought online or obtained from a bar). In response, Toshiko logically proved to Owen that biology — the science he had spent his life following — didn’t exist, being partly biochemistry, which was just a branch of chemistry, and partly classification of forms, which was just stamp collecting. And chemistry itself was just a branch of physics because it depended on how atoms and molecules interacted. Owen got really tetchy when she got to that point in the argument, and either put his headphones on and turned the music up loud or just stalked off in a huff. And that left Toshiko feeling like she had lost the argument, because the last thing in the world she wanted was for Owen to stop talking to her, and that was something that physics just couldn’t explain.
Openings in the brick walls on either side of her provided glimpses of large, brick-lined chambers, some containing piles of crates and some row upon row of metal shelving filled with anonymous boxes. It was the Torchwood Archive; Ianto’s domain, where the various bits of alien technology that Jack and the team had found, confiscated or otherwise obtained were now stored. Not for any particular purpose, but just to keep them out of the way.
A shadowy figure stepped from an opening ahead of her, and Toshiko stopped dead, putting a hand to her mouth to suppress a sudden scream.
Gwen lit the aromatherapy candle in the centre of the dinner table. Sandalwood and cedar-wood: that should set the right mood, if the search she had done on the Internet before popping out to the shops meant anything at all.
As a thin trail of smoke drifted up towards the ceiling, she stood back and looked at the table. The sweet white wine was open and cooling in the ice bucket, the good cutlery — the stuff with the beech-wood handles which hadn’t come out of the cupboard since Rhys’s sister had come to visit the year before last — was on the table and the food was cooking gently in the oven. Chicken breasts marinated in lime juice and orange juice, then wrapped in Parma ham and left in an oven dish on gas mark 4 for three-quarters of an hour. The smell was making her salivate already, and the food still had a quarter of an hour to go. The asparagus was in a dish, ready to pop in the microwave when the chicken was ready, and she even had a little parmesan to crumble over the asparagus when it was cooked. It didn’t matter that Gwen thought parmesan smelled like puke and asparagus made her pee smell terrible; Rhys liked them, and this was all for him.
She crossed the room to the light switch and turned the lights down, just a little bit more, then went across to Rhys’s pride and joy, the stereo stack system that he’d bought, piece by piece, from an audio specialist in Cardiff, and set the CD going. The Flaming Lips burst from the speakers in a fanfare of confusion. Quickly she pressed the stop button and selected something quieter from the rack. Suzanne Vega; that should do. As the strains of ‘Luka’ drifted across the room she allowed herself to relax. Just a little bit.
Just two things left. One of them was Rhys.
She had texted him earlier, and told him he needed to be home by seven p.m. He’d texted back saying that he was in the centre of town on a job, but he’d be back on time. It was five to seven now, and she was beginning to get a little edgy.
Which reminded her. The alien device. She didn’t want to be edgy when that was switched on. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and held it, then let it out gently, visualising her tension flowing out of her with the breath. It worked: she could feel muscles that she didn’t even know were tense letting go and she could feel her fingers unclenching.
She had put the alien tech beneath the candle, in the middle of the table. She wanted it somewhere central, and that was the best place. It even looked like something decorative, albeit something one might buy from a seaside craft shop to remember a holiday by, rather than pick out of an Ikea catalogue. For a while she had thought of hiding it in the room, or beneath the table, but that had seemed wrong. Having it in plain sight somehow made her feel like she wasn’t actually manipulating Rhys’s feelings without him knowing.
Of course, explaining to Jack how wax had spilled on it was going to be tricky, but she had until tomorrow to think about that.
Gwen quickly ran her fingers over the blister-like controls on the ribbon encircling the device. Gwen had been listening carefully when Toshiko had been demonstrating the device, and she was sure she remembered what to touch in order to get a generalised amplification of emotion within a few feet of the device. All she had to do was think sexy thoughts, and hopefully Rhys should pick up on them. His sexy thoughts would echo back to her, and with luck they might not even get to dessert. Which was a shame, because she’d prepared a coffee crème brûlée, just in case. Well, she’d bought a coffee crème brûlée at the supermarket at least, and it had been expensive. Well, they were on a two-for-one deal, but it was the thought that counted.
Gwen took another deep breath. Was this right? Was she doing the right thing? In the short time that she’d been with Torchwood she’d seen what happened when people took alien devices home and tried to use them. It rarely ended well, and Jack came down hard on anyone who tried — but this was her and Rhys. This was their future. Jack didn’t understand, he didn’t have a life of his own, as far as Gwen could tell, but if Gwen lost Rhys then she would have lost the one anchor she had to the real world. Despite the risks, despite the danger, she had to try.
Things between her and Rhys weren’t exactly bad, they just weren’t good. They weren’t the way she remembered them being, when they first met and fell into bed. The sex wasn’t the ‘wild, sweaty, so desperate for deep penetration that clothes got ripped’ kind any more. It was more the ‘it’s been a week and we really should have a romp even though we’re both knackered’ kind. And that was only one step from the ‘let’s not bother, eh?’ kind.
A horrible thought occurred to Gwen. The definition of getting old was that you’d already made love for the last time in your life, but you hadn’t realised yet.
At which point, just as she got into the wrong frame of mind, she heard Rhys’s key in the lock.
For a moment, all Toshiko could see, illuminated by the orange ceiling lights of the tunnels, was the bulky, stooped shape of a Weevil. Then her eyes adjusted and she saw that it was Ianto. Only Ianto, wearing a suit and looking like he belonged there, in the darkness, underground.
Physics. Light and shade, and the electrical reactivity of cells in the eyes. That’s all it was. Keep telling yourself that.
‘Ianto?’ Her voice was shriller than she would have liked. ‘What are you doing down here?’
He glanced casually back into the shadows behind him, and then turned back to Toshiko. ‘I’m… auditing the Archive,’ he said carefully. ‘The records from the early years of Torchwood are pretty vague. I try and get down here as often as I can and correlate the contents of the boxes with the files we keep in the Hub. You’d be surprised at the stuff I’ve discovered we have but don’t know about, or don’t have but think we do. There’s stuff here going back to 1885. I was just checking the chamber we have set aside for the remnants of Operation Goldenrod. Were you part of that?’